Transcript

Robyn Williams: The firm Ozgene, in the west has just celebrated its 5th birthday. Set up by two scientists who were at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, they now employ 45 people in Perth. This is the founder on Dr Frank Koentgen on what you do with a genetically modified mouse.

Frank Koentgen: A very simple example: if you have a large family going to a GP and a couple of people in that family have cystic fibrosis let's say, the GP takes a couple of DNA samples, they get analysed and he finds that in the people with cystic fibrosis there's a certain genetic change. So obviously what he wants to know is whether that change causes the cystic fibrosis. So he comes to a company like us, there's about maybe ten others in the world, and says can you make a mouse that has exactly the same genetic change? We then make that animal and if that animal also develops cystic fibrosis then bingo, you've obviously found one of the causes for the cystic fibrosis (a) but (b) you also have an animal model that might allow you to find the treatment or cure for that particular disease.

Robyn Williams: How do you get the gene for cystic fibrosis into the mouse?

Frank Koentgen: All very simple. You go to a publicly available data bases, they would have all the genetic information particularly for the mouse and for a human and also for the rat available. The GP will already give you a small snippet and say, well this is the one that is different, we then can go into the data base, find the equivalent mouse gene, we then can order from, you know, numerous companies in the world small pieces of DNA that will allow us to extract out of mouse DNA the piece that we need, then we make the changes in the test tube as required, then we take this changed piece of DNA, stick it into stem cells and I put in here, they are mouse stem cells and not human stem cells, embryonic stem cells, then once we find the right embryonic stem cell that has the desired change we then take that embryonic stem cell and make a new mouse out of it. Simple.

Robyn Williams: How come you here in Perth seem to be leading the world, as you claim, in this?

Frank Koentgen: No, other people claim that, I don't claim that.

Robyn Williams:Other people claim that, yes. It is claimed in general that you're doing so terribly well after five years.

Frank Koentgen: I think you know the answer to that probably. Ozgene doesn't have investors and I can focus on doing things well and not on profits. And because we don't focus on profits we focus on working for other scientists.

Robyn Williams: It's a company for scientists run by scientists.

Frank Koentgen: That's exactly right. So the company was founded by myself and by my wife Gabi Seuss, we're both PhDs in genetics and we founded the company and we're running it.

Robyn Williams: You mentioned cystic fibrosis; what other sorts of diseases, what other sorts of genetics have you gone in for?

Frank Koentgen: I could have taken spina bifida because that's one that we did and that was done with Steven James' lab from the Bone Marrow Research Institute in Melbourne where they had a particular gene of interest, and they came to us and said: Can you make a mouse that doesn't have it any more? And we generated an animal that doesn't have that gene. So it's basically that mouse, the function of that gene is completely destroyed and that animal then developed spina bifida. And that was exactly the right thing; it was the first time the cause of spina bifida was discovered and it now allows us to find potential treatment or cure for it, if that's possible. Other diseases that we're working on - you basically can start listing any type of disease that you'd have heard of and you've interviewed other people about, and we would in some form or shape be working on it. We currently have about 350 individual projects, from probably half that number of clients around the world, that are in central nervous system deficiencies, in diabetes, Parkinson, Alzheimer's and so forth and so forth.

Robyn Williams: And Perth's a great base from which to do this sort of thing?

Frank Koentgen: Everybody asks that question and I don't know why people ask that question. If you're a globally orientated business, and more than 90% of our business is outside of Australia - and most people consider the eastern states as outside of Australia - it doesn't really matter. No matter where you are on planet 90% of your customers will not be where you are, so it doesn't really matter where you are. Perth is good for time zones; you've got the east coast, you've got the west coast of the US in the morning, you've got the east coast of the US in the evening, you've got Europe all day, you've got Japan and China and Hong Kong and Singapore during the day. And we picked Perth because of two reasons - one, it's probably the best lifestyle on the planet, we've got a young family and two, there is a very large and very professional mouse breeding facility here that we have an alliance with.